03 December 2012

Mitt and Ann Romney are having difficulty adjusting to life after being overwhelmingly rejected by the voters. The Republican presidential nominee is "detached" and "in seclusion" at his mansion outside San Diego, according to friends interviewed by the Washington Post.

Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There’s no aide to make his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and e-mailing his CEO buddies who have been swooping in and out of La Jolla to visit. ...

By all accounts, the past month has been most difficult on Romney’s wife, Ann, who friends said believed up until the end that ascending to the White House was their destiny. They said she has been crying in private and trying to get back to riding her horses....

In private, Romney has told friends he has little interest in helping the Republican Party rebuild and re-brand itself. Advisers also said he felt no need to explain himself after his comments to donors about Obama using the power of incumbency to give “gifts” to female, black and Latino voters leaked into the public sphere.

There is some hope. Mitt and Ann are reportedly looking forward to exstensive renovations that will transform their "beach house into an 11,000-square-foot manse complete with a car elevator."

19 November 2012

Our latest for EBONY: "Everybody has a right to vote but nobody in these towns knows anyone who's Black,” said Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster.

Webster has been forced to issue a public apology after his bizarre allegations that “dozens [and] dozens of Black people [came] in and voted on Election Day.” Webster implied that this could have tipped the state’s vote to President Obama.

Webster’s preposterous comments were not satire for “The Onion." The remarks were made to Portland’s NBC affiliate WCSH-TV and represented the latest in a series of racially-charged post-election commentary by the Republican official. Webster made similar comments the previous day and “refused to provide specifics” or proof, reports the Portland Press Herald. “I'm not talking about 15 or 20. I'm talking hundreds.”

More than 95.5% of Mainers are white—the second highest percentage after Vermont. It’s very likely that many Mainers, especially those in rural areas, do not have any have Black neighbors. It’s also likely that “dozens and dozens” of Blacks were trying to vote in Maine on Election Day—probably the very few Blacks who actually live there.

09 November 2012

From the moment Mitt Romney stepped off stage Tuesday night, having just delivered a brief concession speech he wrote only that evening, the massive infrastructure surrounding his campaign quickly began to disassemble itself. Aides taking cabs home late that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked to the campaign no longer worked. [...]

Were they looking for a "handout"? The visual of hundreds of waitresses, cab drivers and unionized airline ticket counter employees telling Romney staffers "Your card has been declined!" is positively delicious.

The stakes were particularly critical for the 1.1 million Americans
living with HIV/AIDS or those at risk of infection -- and those people
are disproportionately Black and low-income.
“Much of this population is uninsured or under-insured,” says C. Virginia Fields, president and CEO of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS.. “Thousands more people now have health care -- including many people who are HIV positive.”

The South has become the epicenter of Black America’s HIV epidemic.
More “new AIDS cases were diagnosed among Black men who have sex with
men in the South than in all regions combined,” the Black AIDS Institute
reported in "Back of the Line: The State of AIDS Among Black Gay Men in
America.” Black women account for nearly three-quarters of all new
infections among women in the South.

“Those states have more poverty, larger concentrations of Blacks and
often have Republican-lead state governments,” notes Texas Woman’s
University assistant professor Kimberly A. Parker, Ph.D., M.P.H. “Sex-education and HIV-prevention education are limited. Many states officially promote ‘abstinence’.”

05 November 2012

News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch's is not pleased with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's praise of President Obama's handling of Hurricane Sandy. Murdoch lashed out in a series of tweets, culminating in this message where he approved cancellation of the New York City marathon and warned that Christie will "take blame" for the next four years unless he "re-declare[s] for Romney."

Murdoch gives a "slight edge" to Obama but doubts the accuracy of the key state polls. Heehee.

Campaign sources concede superstorm Sandy stalled Romney's momentum. For eight straight days, polls showed him picking up support. The campaign's internal polling, which is using different turnout models than most public polls, had him on solid ground in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Iowa. He had a slight lead or was tied in Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin and was in striking distance in Pennsylvania, a state Republicans hadn't won since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

But then came something very big: a natural disaster that left a path of death and destruction on the East Coast. Suddenly, there was little talk about small things. Those leads in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Iowa still hold in the internal polls, campaign sources say, but Romney's movement flattened out or, as the campaign likes to say, "paused." Nevada is now off the table.

Republican strategist and former Bush deputy chief of staff Karl Rove continues the meme in a Friday interview with The Washington Post, claiming that Hurricane Sandy was the "October Surprise."

"If you hadn’t had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy. There was a stutter in the campaign. When you have attention drawn away to somewhere else, to something else, it is not to his [Romney's] advantage,” Rove [said]. "Obama has temporarily been a bipartisan figure this week. He has been the comforter-in-chief and that helps."

30 October 2012

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney "refused to answer repeated questions about how he
would handle the duties of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency" while on the campaign trail today. The former Massachusetts governor has previously criticized federal disaster relief spending and suggested that he would privatize FEMA to respond to disasters such as Hurricane Sandy.

The questions came at an event in in Kettering, Ohio, "that was hastily converted into a 'storm relief event'" reports Reuters and the Washington Post.

"Governor, are you going to see some storm damage?" one reporter asked. Several others again asked Romney whether he would eliminate FEMA. "Governor, you’ve been asked 14 times. Why are you refusing to answer the question?" one asked.

Romney ignored the reporters’ queries and continued loading up the truck. Earlier, during the event, he ignored similar queries. During a 2011 primary debate, Romney supported the idea of curtailing federal disaster response and letting states and the private sector take on a bigger role.

TV pool asked Romney at least five times whether he would eliminate FEMA
as president/what he would do with FEMA. He ignored the qs but they are
audible on cam. The music stopped at points and the qs would have been
audible to him.

29 October 2012

This is particularly relevant as the massive Hurricane Sandy prepares to make landfall ...

Gov. Mitt Romney was asked in a June 2011 debate about federal disaster relief funding. Romney suggested eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, privatizing disaster relief and said it would be "'immoral" for the federal government to fund disaster relief efforts without cutting the budget elsewhere," notes Think Progress.

CNN: Governor Romney? You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?

ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.

Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut — we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do?

Apparently this was the "severely conservative" Mitt Romney speaking. Not sure what today's Romney Version 8.0 would say. Watch AFTER THE JUMP ...

28 October 2012

The editorial board of The New York Times has endorsed President Barack Obama's re-election campaign.

The Times applauded the President's "many impressive achievements" around the economy, foreign policy, health care and civil rights. The editors called attention to the President's record on LGBT equality and Mitt Romney's opposition to that platform

The military’s odious “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule was finally legislated out of existence, under the Obama administration’s leadership. There are still big hurdles to equality to be brought down, including the Defense of Marriage Act, the outrageous federal law that undermines the rights of gay men and lesbians, even in states that recognize those rights.

Though it took Mr. Obama some time to do it, he overcame his hesitation about same-sex marriage and declared his support. That support has helped spur marriage-equality movements around the country. His Justice Department has also stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act against constitutional challenges.

Mr. Romney opposes same-sex marriage and supports the federal act, which not only denies federal benefits and recognition to same-sex couples but allows states to ignore marriages made in other states. His campaign declared that Mr. Romney would not object if states also banned adoption by same-sex couples and restricted their rights to hospital visitation and other privileges.